Designing an Organic Character
This section shows you how to begin creating a 3D character in Maya by taking you through the basic preproduction design process. Some character-idea generation approaches are presented, and you are shown how to create the designs that you will later use as guides for modeling vour characters skin.
Design Considerations
The first thing you want to do when designing your character is to decide the style you want to use. At one extreme, you could design a completely stylized cartoon character; at the other extreme, you could design a fully realistic character. Because this book focuses on creating characters that have a muscle and bone structure, you should avoid designing a completely cartoon character for working through each chapters exercises. A completely realistic character, on the other hand, can be too challenging for someone who is not already a professional Photorealistic characters must not only look real, they must also animate realistically, which requires a lot of subtleties in the character controls. Between these two extremes is a surreal character design, such as a Shrek-st>rle character. This kind of character has a stylized look, while
amnution in the form of scripts, are dehvered and created by the ^ development group. Its great that it is a very broad and demanding ^M as far as the knowledge and skill sets reqmred. jMjjj q: Do you use strictly proprietary software? jH
A: We use a combination, so that animation may be done with off-the-shelf software, but our simulations are pretty much done with pro. prietary software. We have our own rigid body and cloth software. However, we do write our own plug-ins and tools within comment animation packages.
Q: What skills should someone develop who wants to get a job as a setup artist at a company such as 1LM? ^H
A: At this point in time, scripting is absolutely critical. 1 know that scares a lot of students, and it even scared me, but once you determine that you are going to learn it. you can. If you look at the future, where this is all heading, its becoming more and more script driven, because you really need to be able to manipulate the software. These commercial packages are now open, so we can use something like MEL to make the software do what we need it to do. That's the power we need. With MEL. there are built-in mathematical functions, so you can dig into the software and manipulate it with math, which is a growing need. Manipulating MEL may get you 80 percent of the way to your goal, but you may have to use some crazy math to conjure up the last 20 percent and get the software to do what you want it to do.
Q: Do you also set up the muscle systems tor the character, and how much anatomy knowledge must vou have?
A: Not only do we set up the muscles, but after a simulation is run, we also really go through and look at the anatomy. We check to see if the muscles are moving correctly, and will if necessary go in by hand and make sure the shape of the muscles is anatomically correct. Sometimes
we even do a little bit of modeling in our department as well. We are smack-dab in the middle of the production process, so we get the character and user interfaces rolling and off to the animators, and then we will get the characters back again later to perform simulations, and then we hand it off to the technical directors for lighting. M
Q: Do you have any other closing advice for someone who wants to become a professional creature developer? J^M
A: Learning the software is one thing, but understanding how things are working under the hood, and being able to manipulate that, is very imp«
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We are looking for pc industry, and who are working on.They <h< know how to rig, bu< problems.You can't h movement and jigg)e show a skeleton wall should show that the movement, and how out proprietary simi
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important. 1 his means not only having scripting knowledge, but understanding why numbers in the channels come up the way they do when you constrain and parent objects. T his requires understanding coordinate systems, and being able to problem solve. Understanding why the numbers are changing when you are working with things such as orient constraints enables you to troubleshoot problems and is the real benefit of knowing what's under the hood of the software. There will be situations when just doing a constraint won't work, and you may have to rearrange parts of the hierarchy, and then do the constraint.
We are looking for people who are on top of the current state of the industry, and who are trying to solve the same problems that we are working on. They should try to show on their reel that they not only know how to rig, but that they also are trying to innovate and solve problems. You can't have a character move without secondary muscle movement and jiggle, which is what we do all day long. If they just show a skeleton walking around, that's not going to be enough. They should show that they are really concerned with the details of character movement, and how the flesh is moving. If they can do that even without proprietary simulation tools, it shows innovation.
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